Applications for medical-marijuana sites open

Pat Shannahan/The Republic Steve Valdez, head of a non-profit aimed at helping medical caregivers, takes Ross Smith through his varieties of marijuana plants at a Maraijuana Farmer's Market in Phoenix at weGrow Hydroponic Supplies Superstore. Growers were on hand to meet with medical marijuana patients.



The Arizona Department of Health Services will accept applications for medical-marijuana dispensaries through 5 p.m. May 25.

Under the voter-approved Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, the state can have 126 medical-marijuana dispensaries, but the application process had been stalled because of lawsuits and rule making.

Would-be marijuana-dispensary operators must pay a $5,000 fee. If they are not selected, the state will return $1,000, state health officials said. Applicants must be at least 21 years old and cannot be a law-enforcement officer or a physician who is currently writing certifications for patients. Applicants also cannot have certain felony convictions within the last 10 years. Applicants can operate up to five dispensaries.

The law limits the number of dispensaries that can operate geographically throughout the state, and if there are too many applications in any one area, health officials will award dispensary certifications through a lottery system.

State health officials expect to award dispensary certificates this summer.

If selected, the dispensaries can grow medical marijuana and acquire it from other registered non-profit dispensaries or from registered patients or caregivers.

Arizona Department of Health Services Director Will Humble expects to award fewer than 110 applications, based on public interest so far, and likely between 70 or 80. He doesn't expect Native American tribes to apply for dispensary certificates, based on demographic data the state has collected showing little or no interest in the program.

That same data show that people of all ages and backgrounds -- including the elderly, Baby Boomers and 20- to 30-somethings -- use medical marijuana.

More than 22,200 people have received permission to smoke, eat or otherwise ingest marijuana to ease their ailments. Of those, nearly three-quarters are men, and nearly 85 percent of all patients have requested to grow their own.

Sunny Singh, owner of WeGrow Phoenix, helps medical-marijuana patients and caregivers grow marijuana to target certain ailments. Recently, he's been working with patients and caregivers to help them design grow rooms. He hopes to expand his business and contract with dispensaries.

"We want to change our focus to target the dispensary sites, but there's really been nowhere for us to go" since the dispensary-application process stalled, Singh said. "Being that there can be 126 dispensaries in Arizona, we think we'll be very successful."

by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez - May. 13, 2012 08:40 PM The Republic | azcentral.com



Applications for medical-marijuana sites open

Arizona officials hold medical pot hearing

Fifteen years after returning home from war, Crush Estrada could still smell the death and destruction from his days as a helicopter gunner for the Air Force, his wife, Cory Tyszka, said Friday.

Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and other medical conditions, his doctors prescribed narcotics, sleeping pills and a host of other drugs to help him through the long days and nights. The pills helped but often caused other problems. He couldn't sleep through the night and "he was a zombie" during the day, Tyszka said.

Her remarks came during a 21/2-hour public hearing at the Arizona Department of Health Services, which could expand the state's medical-marijuana program to include PTSD, depression, anxiety and migraines as qualifying conditions for medical-marijuana ingestion.

Tyszka said she would often awake to her husband's night terrors. First came the heavy breathing, then the panic, the shaking, swearing and then tears.

About a year ago, Tyszka's husband received certification to smoke marijuana under the state's medical-marijuana program. She has Crohn's disease and also is part of the state's medical-marijuana program.

"He now can sleep through the night," she said. "It makes him able to function during the day as well. He can do things now. He doesn't get frustrated at the smallest things."

More than two dozen people spoke in favor of expanding the state's medical-marijuana program at the hearing, offering anecdotal evidence and medical records to show how pot helped them deal with night terrors, sleeping difficulties, irritability, frustration, headaches and other conditions caused by illnesses.

Several doctors and anti-drug advocates sympathized but spoke against expansion, saying there is no evidence to prove the benefits of medical marijuana. They also said it could create dangerous situations on the road and in the home.

One opponent pointed out that there is no standardization of marijuana dosage and suggested that adding conditions could encourage further abuse.

State health officials must periodically consider adding conditions to the program under the 2010 law approved by voters.

Department of Health Services Director Will Humble, who oversees the medical-marijuana program, expects to decide whether to add any of the proposed conditions by mid-July. He will consider Friday's testimony when making that decision, he said.

"This is an important part of the process," he said. "But I want to make sure I'm basing my decision on good science, and I'm really looking at the full weight of evidence."

As of May 8, nearly 28,300 patients and nearly 1,670 caregivers participated in the state's program, which allows them to use or grow medical marijuana for certain conditions. If PTSD alone is added as a qualifying condition, Humble expects to add 15,000 to 20,000 new patients.

Arizona would become the only state in the nation to allow medical marijuana for anxiety and depression. New Mexico is the only state that actively allows medical marijuana for PTSD.

Kent Eller, a doctor with experience in treating seriously mentally ill patients, said the state should not add depression to the program. He said there is no scientific proof that the drug effectively treats depression and recurrence of depression.

"My fear is that if we would allow marijuana, the patient could go get their card and then they would be on their own," Eller said. "And during that time, we would not have the opportunity to see an emergence of a more serious (condition). It could potentially cause a further problem for patients."

Other opponents said medical marijuana poses dangers for the larger community.

"It's the safety on the road when you're driving, safety with equipment, safety with the family, safety when you're handling a gun," said Leland Fairbanks, a longtime physician and member of an anti-drug advocacy group. "I do not believe that we (should be adding) conditions. Some that are on the list are dubious and are being abused now."

Charise Voss said medical marijuana changed her life. She once suffered from debilitating migraines, which she tried to control through prescription drugs that caused other medical conditions. She tried marijuana, and it worked.

"I have no side effects, and for the first time in my life, I am pain-free," said Voss, 47.

"I never thought I'd be here today to be an advocate for marijuana," she said. "But what we need is a choice."

Shortly before the 5 p.m. Friday deadline, the state health department had received more than 400 applications for medical-marijuana dispensaries.

State law allows 126 dispensaries. Health officials plan to award dispensary certificates on Aug. 7.

by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez - May. 25, 2012 10:16 PM The Republic | azcentral.com



Arizona officials hold medical pot hearing

Applicants battle for Fountain Hills pot permit

The competition is expanding among applicants vying to open the only medical-marijuana dispensary that will be allowed in Fountain Hills.

So far, Bob Rodgers, the town's senior planner, has approved five zoning-verification applications for medical-marijuana facilities in the town.

The applicants are:

Restaurateur Josh Levine, for a dispensary on a vacant lot at 16935 E. Colony Drive.

Yvonne Wolf, co-owner of Wolf Brothers Construction Co., for a dispensary on a lot at 12008 N. Colony Drive.

The Healing Co., for a dispensary at 17007 E. Colony Drive, Suite 3.

Vladimir Buer of Buer Revocable Trust, for a dispensary at 16913 E. Enterprise Drive, units 103, 201 and 202.

Douglas Shaughnessy, for a dispensary at 16939 E. Colony Drive, Unit 2.

The deadline for submitting license applications to the Arizona Department of Health Services is 5 p.m. May 25.

Rodgers expects the number of applicants to be "fast and furious for the next week and a half."

"Everybody who has zoning verification will have their names thrown into a hat and one will get picked (for the state license)," he said.

The Department of Health Services will be awarding more than 100 dispensary licenses statewide.

So far, no applications have been received for facilities in Fountain Hills and no licenses will be awarded until August, according to the department.

The number of zoning verifications has increased since North Chapel Community Bible Church relocated from an office building at 16929 E. Enterprise Drive.

Numerous applications previously had been rejected, mostly because they were too close to the church.

The Healing Co., Buer and Shaughnessy applications were approved after the church relocation.

Shaughnessy's application was approved this week.

"There's been about a dozen so far that have requested zoning verification," Rodgers said.

A spokesman for the Healing Co., couldn't be reached for comment.

According to the Healing Co.'s website, it will "immediately establish itself as the model for all caregivers in the state."

The site also said the Healing Co. has "systems and procedures in place to ensure that all members are screened, verified and monitored in accordance with all applicable laws concerning the dispensing of medical marijuana."

Buer and Shaughnessy also couldn't be reached for comment.

The applicant who receives the license for Fountain Hills will have to return to the town for a business license, Rogers said.

They will then need renovation and construction permits, he added.

Finally, the applicant then will have to meet the construction guidelines outlined in the town's medical-marijuana ordinance, Rogers said.

by Edward Gately - May. 21, 2012 08:03 AM The Republic | azcentral.com




Applicants battle for Fountain Hills pot permit

The Dangers of High-Speed Trading - US Business News - CNBC

What is possible at the speed of light? Arbitrage is possible at the speed of light at 11 millisecond between NYSE and CME which was once unfathomable, however, is potentially and presently possible with computers. This is just incredible.

Comstock | Getty Images


Eric Scott Hunsader has gone completely down the rabbit hole, and he doesn’t like what he’s finding there.

Hunsader is the CEO of a Chicago-based market analytics firm that specializes in high-frequency trading — super fast trades executed at the speed of light that can alter asset prices faster than human beings can react to the changes.

Based on his own analysis, Hunsader has come to a startling conclusion: Markets today are even more susceptible to sudden failure than they were two years ago during the “flash crash,” which brought the stock market down by about 1,000 points in mere minutes.

That’s because a new breed of trader armed with hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy is trading so fast—and with such spikes in volume—that he can dry up liquidity in an instant, causing severe price swings.

To explain to a lay person, Hunsader offers up two examples of the kinds of trades he’s seeing. The first happened less than a minute before the April Jobs report was released by the Department of Labor in Washington.

That report is traditionally one of the most dramatic market-moving events of each month. As a result, traders tend to lie low in the minute or so before the number comes out at 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of each month, so they don’t get caught when the market changes.

But Hunsader argues that he’s seeing a small group of high speed traders who aren’t lying low. In fact, they’re taking advantage of the regular and predictable lull in the market to pop high speed trades in order to intentionally create a several hundred millisecond burst of volatility, and then execute follow-on trades to profit from that.

To understand what happens, you have to go inside just one second of trading and look at the way markets move at speeds that can be almost imperceptible to human beings.

On May 4, Hunsader says, he spotted those traders just before the April number was released. At 8:29:20 and about 200 milliseconds, he says, someone — he has no way of knowing who — executed a trade in the five year T-note futures market worth about $150 million.

A chart of that single second in the market shows that prices are relatively stable until the trade. And just after that, for the rest of the second, prices spike, and gyrate up and down as other automated high speed computers react to the trade.

Hunsader says he doesn’t know exactly how the traders make money off the volatility that they create, but he suspects they’re making other trades in the milliseconds following their market moving trade that take advantage of the relationships between this market and others that are impacted by it.

The traders that move first, and fastest, win, he says.

“It’s like two guys running in the woods, and they see a bear and one guy drops down and puts his shoes on and the other guy says, ‘what are you doing that for, you can’t outrun a bear,’” Hunsader says. “And the guy goes, ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.’”

On another occasion, Hunsader says he saw traders taking advantage of something as fundamental as the speed of light.

Because trades are executed by fiber-optic cable, the fastest they can travel—and the fastest anything in the universe can travel—is the speed of light. But even at that speed, it takes about 11 milliseconds for information from exchanges based in New York to get to exchanges based in Chicago. And that provides an opportunity for arbitrage for those who can move fast enough.

“Recently, they put in this new high speed line between Chicago and New York,” Hunsader says. “Essentially (they) drilled through mountains to shave a few milliseconds — thousandths of seconds — off, getting it down to 11 milliseconds. But I think somebody’s figured out how to get it to zero milliseconds.”

And the way they do that, in effect, became clear on May 3, Hunsader argues.

At 9:59:11 and about 620 milliseconds, someone executed a trade in Chicago, purchasing about 1,300 ES contracts for about $70 million. That happened to come in a lull just before two economic indicators were to be released at 10 a.m. that day.

At the exact same millisecond, 9:59:11 and about 620 milliseconds, Hunsader says, another trade was executed: Somebody bought 260,000 shares of a closely correlated product, SPY, for about $36 million.

Hunsader has no way of knowing for sure it was the same person executing both trades. But he says he sees same millisecond trades happening in both cities in related products often enough that he doesn’t think it can be pure coincidence.

In fact, he says, someone placing big orders in related products in both cities would gain a valuable advantage: for 11 milliseconds, they would be the only ones in the world who knew what happened in both markets.

By the time Chicago received the information about what happened in New York, and New York received the information about what happened in Chicago, Hunsader says, the traders who execute such trades would have a relatively long time to position themselves for the predictable fallout. And that’s a profit opportunity.

“The speed of light is fast,” Hunsader says, “But it’s not as fast as the high frequency traders would like it to be.”

The trick is, you have to have a super-fast computer and $100 million in deployable cash to make it work.

Hunsader says he sees these trades happening so frequently, in fact, that he advises individual investors not to make any trades at all between 9:58 and 10:02 a.m. Eastern, since many economic reports are released at exactly 10 a.m.

The high speed, high volume trading he’s seeing can cause asset prices to gap by small increments — so that if you’re executing a trade at that minute and a high speed trader is jamming data lines at the same time, you might not get the deal at the price you thought when you pressed the button to process the trade.

What’s more, Hunsader says, this kind of trading is causing market instability—to the extent that the right set of circumstances could set off a cascade much worse than the flash crash of 2010.

“You might hear, ‘we’re doing fine, now,’” Hunsader says. “Well, yes, everything will be just fine as long as, as the news is sunshine-y happy. If you get a shock to system, you’re going to see very quickly just how undercapacity we are.”

Not everybody sees high speed trading as dangerous, of course. CNBC spoke to Jim Overdahl, a vice president at NERA Economic Consulting, who argued that high frequency trades are an important tool for professional traders.

“I think the bottom line argument on the benefits of high-frequency trading: it’s a risk management tool for professional traders,” Oberdhal said. “It allows them to quickly revise their quotes and offer better quotes because they’re able to manage the risk of being picked off by better informed trader or traders with superior information about order flow or market moving news.”

by Eamon Javers CNBC May 15, 2012




The Dangers of High-Speed Trading - US  Business News - CNBC